In 1792 Francisco Goya (1746-1828), then the official painter for the king of Spain, fell seriously ill with a disease modern medicine can still only guess at. We do know that the illness left the artist stone deaf.

Cut off suddenly, in the middle of his life, from most social interaction, Goya began devoting more and more of his energies to private drawings and small paintings, and ultimately to making prints.

Through Dec. 14, the Zimmerli Museum will be showing "Dark Dreams: The Prints of Francisco Goya," a selection from the collection of the Arthur Ross Foundation that includes a complete set of both Goya's "Caprichos" and his "Disparates," some 88 etchings in all. These enigmatic images have a strange and oddly guilty appeal that grows each year, no matter how familiar they have become.

Have you ever turned down the sound on the TV and watched how ridiculously fevered the actors' gestures seem when you can't follow their words? That's how Goya saw the world after he lost his hearing, and he did not underestimate the creepiness factor.

Goya depicts monks with bat ears, pretty girls with hunchbacked suitors ("What a sacrifice!" he called it), men in beaked hats flapping the wings of a flying machine, monstrous dwarves clacking castanets and a great hooded figure causing frightened soldiers to run into a tangled pile of bodies and limbs. And, of course, the most famous print of all, his original frontispiece, showing Goya slumped on a plinth with his head on his arms surrounded by bats and owls, printed over a legend reading "The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters."

Goya was hearing no evil, but he could see plenty, and many art historians have since seen the origins of both modern art and photojournalism in these prints. Not until Matthew Brady's photos of the dead at Gettysburg do we get anything like Goya's series of prints about Napoleon's war in Spain. He was the first person ever to show war as it really is, full of dismembered bodies and casual cruelties.

Though he had no real training in printmaking, Goya was a big fan of Rembrandt's etchings, and he used the Dutch master's dramatic lighting to create these odd surrealities.

They were, in fact, so odd that Goya's potential audience could not make heads or tails of them. In 1799 Goya took out an ad in El Diario, the biggest paper in Madrid, announcing the release of his "Caprichos" (it means "caprices," to be understood as both a flight of fancy or a paroxysm of fear). He had printed up 300 sets (the images here are taken from one of those original editions, so they were all pulled by Goya himself) and waited for customers. They never came.

"He sold maybe 30 sets," says Christine Giviskos, associate curator for 19th-century European art at the Zimmerli and the organizer of "Dark Dreams." "We have these prints in such good shape because just four years later, in 1803, Goya went to the Academy (of art) and offered to give them the rest of the printed series plus the finished plates in exchange for a small pension for his son, who was studying to be a painter."

As it turned out, the prints became a legacy not just for Goya's son but for scads of other artists, down to our own day. In addition to a series of cunningly updated versions of the "Caprichos" by Mexican-born American artist Enrique Chagoya (updated, for example, by placing a smart bomb between the legs of the man in the flying machine, or by putting George Bush's face on one of the lumpishly deformed monstrosities), "Dark Dreams" also has the life-size photo print on aluminum that reprises "The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters" by Yinka Shonibare (born in Nigeria in 1963), which recently graced the cover of Art in America magazine's politics issue.

You couldn't hope for a more fitting show just as American politics gins itself up for making history.